Oil Thief
My mother asked, “Sanha, you know your father used to work for a big pipeline company in Texas, right?”
“Yeah. A long time ago. Before I was born.”
I nodded.
Gray Smoke Pipeline & Energy.
I had heard that my father had once been the first Asian to work there, at a massive oil company.
Back then, I’d assumed he’d been nothing more than a laborer. But the story my mother told me was something else entirely.
“Your father wasn’t just an employee there. He was the chief engineer in the pipeline division—the man who decided where the lines would be laid and made sure there were no leaks.”
“Chief engineer?”
It was hard to believe my father had been that much of an elite.
My mother went on.
“He discovered that his superiors were skimming money from the pipeline installation budget. They used shoddy materials, falsified the paperwork, and siphoned off millions of dollars. Your father reported it to headquarters, but…”
An Asian whistleblower. I already had a bad feeling about where this was going.
“The company turned around and accused your father of embezzlement instead. The white executives closed ranks and fabricated every piece of evidence they needed. They figured an Asian engineer was a perfectly acceptable scapegoat.”
“Of course they did…”
“They sued him. A civil suit for millions in damages. The house was buried under debt in an instant… and that was right around the time you were born.”
My father had exposed corruption at the top, only to be framed for embezzlement himself.
The company filed a multimillion-dollar damages suit against him, and our home was swallowed by debt overnight.
Then my father spoke.
“I wasn’t going to just sit there and take it. I made them pay for underestimating me because I was Asian.”
“How?”
“I told you, the division I worked in handled pipeline installation. So I put holes in their pipelines.”
My father grinned faintly.
“I took your uncle with me—he was unemployed back then. We drilled into Gray Smoke’s pipelines and stole crude oil. In other words, we tapped the line.”
My father knew the underground pipeline network of Gray Smoke like the lines on his own palm.
He would go to the places where the pipes were buried, drill holes small enough to slip past the leak-detection systems, and siphon out the crude.
As he recalled the distant past from some twenty years ago, he went on.
“We dug beneath the ranch country in southern Texas and drilled into the pipes. Your uncle would listen to security patrol radio chatter, and I’d cut a tunnel through the dirt with the excavator until we reached the steel line. I already had the whole layout in my head. We only drilled at spots where the sensors were less sensitive, using a low-temperature plasma cutter. A regular torch would throw sparks and blow the whole pipe sky-high.”
“No accidents?”
“Not a single one. We heated the pipe for exactly twelve seconds and shaved it down little by little. The moment the plate gave way, crude oil would burst out at 150 psi—more than three times the pressure of a car tire. Your uncle would jam in a rubber plug and cover the flange connection while I tightened the four bolts crosswise, as hard as I could. But you couldn’t overdo the tightening either. A spark would fly and ignite it.”
“Wouldn’t the vapor have been terrible?”
“That was scarier than the explosion. If benzene and hydrogen sulfide burn your lungs, you can’t breathe. So we wore respirators and anti-static coveralls. Synthetic fibers can spark just from friction.”
“Good grief. Uncle was part of this too?”
“You know that long scar on your uncle’s cheek? That’s from miscalculating the pressure and having one bolt shoot out like a bullet.”
My mother cut in at my father’s words.
“Anyway, that’s how your father made money. Just enough to cover the damages Gray Smoke wanted, plus the wages and severance they’d stripped away from him. After that, he quit.”
In other words, he’d taken back from Gray Smoke’s own vaults the money Gray Smoke had stolen from him.
My father added, “That was the end of my crimes. After that, I lived clean.”
“Though those truckers who used to buy cheap, unlicensed oil from us are still regulars around here. Even now, when we can’t give it to them that cheap anymore.”
“Hey now. Don’t add unnecessary commentary…”
Only then did I finally nod.
So that’s it. No wonder the truckers always treated Father like some kind of big brother instead of just a gas station owner.
The relationships among the adults that I’d never understood as a child were finally starting to click together like puzzle pieces.
“Anyway, that’s all in the past. But I still remember how to refine crude as clearly as if it happened yesterday. It’s just that…”
My father was still hesitating.
I tried to persuade him.
“Dad, this isn’t stolen oil from somewhere else. It came from our land—our own oil field. You own both the surface rights and the mineral rights. Legally, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Legally, no. But the process of extraction and sale…”
“The law isn’t here to protect us. If we follow the law, we’ll end up losing everything instead.”
“……”
“Permits, environmental impact reviews, public hearings… no, first we need to deal with the creditors. We’re about to lose this house, the gas station, and the oil field all at once for a song.”
“……”
“And even if we had time, the moment we reported it, we’d be finished. The big corporations would come after us with lawsuits like maniacs, and if it came to it, they’d hire thugs to kill our family. You know the Osage murders in Oklahoma were only a few decades ago, right? If white capitalists can kill hundreds just to steal oil rights, then wiping out a family of three Asian immigrants would be nothing to them.”
It wasn’t just the Osage murders.
America had an almost pathological obsession with oil, and it never simply let the weak keep any field they happened to own.
In Texas, when oil was discovered on land owned by Black landholders, white capitalists had taken it through legal tricks backed by armed threats.
In California, American oil companies had exploited legal loopholes to seize oil fields dug up by Mexicans.
In Louisiana, the KKK had used mob violence, murder, and arson to extort oil discovered on Black farmers’ land.
In Alabama, there had even been a systematic fraud aimed at stripping mineral rights specifically from Southern Black families, and the murder of Hispanic ranchers to steal drilling rights wasn’t rare either.
All of it had happened within, at most, the last fifty years—or the last ten.
Hell, if they could invade Iraq on a national scale someday, who was going to care about a handful of dead people of color?
I tried to persuade my father again.
“We can’t tell anyone. We just need to quietly extract it, quietly refine it, and quietly sell it. With your skills and Uncle’s equipment, what can’t we do? And we’ve got plenty of trucker regulars who’ll buy the oil, right? They’re all saying times are hard for them too. If we sell it thirty percent cheaper, we could save a lot of lives.”
“……”
At last, my father nodded.
“All right, son. We’ll do it. But promise me one thing.”
He looked straight into my eyes as he continued.
“If anything goes wrong, this has nothing to do with you. I led it, and you knew nothing about it at all. Understand?”
I nodded.
My father nodded too, then added one more thing.
“And once we’ve got the initial capital, from then on we do everything by the book. We’ll get proper permits, set up a real company, and drill openly and honestly. Promise me that too.”
“…I promise, Dad.”
My father slowly nodded.
“Then we start in two days.”
“What? Not right now?”
“You idiot. With the equipment you brought here, we can’t do a damn thing. We’d blow ourselves up before we even got started.”
My father laughed as he nudged the rusted pipes with his foot.
“Look at these cracks. Once the oil starts flowing, the pressure will force it out through even tiny fissures like this. If you get hit by that, it’ll punch a hole clean through your head. And these bolts? Once we fire up the heating furnace, they’ll all launch like bullets. Just standing nearby is enough to turn you into Swiss cheese.”
“Oh… that bad?”
“If we’re doing it, we do it right. First I need to call your uncle. If I’d explained things properly, he would’ve given us proper equipment.”
At my father’s words, I could only scratch the back of my head.
The way he laughed as he led my mother out of the warehouse, hand in hand with her, somehow made his back look impossibly broad.
* * *
Two days passed.
Inside the gas station warehouse, the new drums, furnace, centrifuge, fractionating column, and heat exchanger were all in place.
Through the haze of faint oil vapor, the flickering light of the bulbs made it hard to tell whether it was morning or evening; time itself felt blurred.
Inside the warehouse, it wasn’t just my father. My uncle and mother were there too, all three of them gathered together.
“All right, from here on out, this isn’t a warehouse anymore. It’s a refinery.”
My father rolled up the sleeves of his work shirt and made the declaration.
My uncle pulled the cigarette from his mouth and grinned.
“Twenty years since I did this last, brother-in-law. This takes me back.”
“If you smoke now, you’re dead.”
My mother plucked the cigarette from my uncle’s mouth and shot him a sharp look.
My uncle took the hint and hurried on.
“Still, I’m a little worried my hands are rusty, brother-in-law.”
“You only needed those hands when you were punching holes in oil pipes with a welder and siphoning the crude out. This is just refining oil that’s already there.”
“Hm, I guess that does make it a lot easier than last time.”
At my father’s words, my uncle and mother both nodded.
I turned my head and looked at the dozens of drums stacked in the corner of the warehouse.
Over the past two days, while my father and uncle had been out finding equipment, my mother and I had hauled in drum after drum of crude oil.
Since the oil field was still overflowing like a black swamp, the drilling cost had been basically zero.
My mother, who had once been a trucker and still had the guts of one, filled drums even faster than I did, and this was the result.
She tied a towel around her head and pulled on thick leather gloves.
“You, don’t push yourself like you did back then. If your back goes out, who’s responsible for that?”
“I know, I know.”
I stared blankly at the scene, then asked, “Um… Mom did this too?”
“Of course I did. Your mother’s better at welding and drilling than your father. Later on, your father just stood to the side and supervised while your mother handled all the boring.”
My uncle answered with a booming laugh, and my mother waved him off.
“Why are you bragging about that to the kid… honestly. Like it’s something to be proud of.”
Meanwhile, my father gave the secondhand equipment one final once-over.
Then he flipped the switch.
Wuuuuuuuuuung!
At last, the centrifuge came to life.
At first there was a clattering rattle in the sound, but as the rotation picked up speed, it smoothed into a steady hum.
While that was happening, I was out in the warehouse backyard, spending ten full minutes trying to loosen a single flange bolt.
I had set the wrench as the book had shown, braced the support with my knee, and thrown my full body weight into it.
I strained so hard the veins in my neck stood out, but the bolt, rusted a deep red with age, sneered at my efforts and didn’t budge.
Thunk—
In the end, the wrench slipped and flew from my hand, and blisters were already starting to form on my palm.
“Son, what are you doing? You can’t even get that off?”
I heard my mother’s voice beside me.
When I looked back, she had already loosened six bolts of the same size on the opposite side.
“It just won’t turn…”
“Move.”
My mother came over and took the wrench from my hand.
Then she sprayed lubricant onto the bolt head and heated the area around it with a torch.
“If rust gets a little heat, it loosens up. Then…”
Keeeeeek—
She set the wrench at a slight angle and put her weight into it.
The bolt turned instantly.
“There. Now you finish the rest.”
“……Yes, ma’am.”
For a moment, I wondered if I was the most useless person here.
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